There's a tiny boarding school in Vermont where students work on a dairy farm and can live in cabins without electricity - and it produced one of the most influential billionaires in Silicon Valley

• The Putney School, located in southern Vermont, is small and located on a dairy farm.
• The 238 students there must work on the farm and in other jobs to graduate.
• They don't learn their grades until halfway through high school.

Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and a Greylock Partners investor, always had an independent streak. At 12, he applied to The Putney School, a tiny boarding school in southern Vermont, without telling his parents.

"Part of what appealed to me about Putney was that in addition to having academics, it was doing blacksmithing and woodworking and working on the farm and art and a bunch of things that I wouldn't otherwise had experience to do," Hoffman told Business Insider's Rich Feloni on an episode of the podcast "Success! How I Did It."

Putney is certainly unique. Students don't learn their grades until more than halfway through high school, and have work requirements on campus, including on the dairy farm where Putney is located.

"Work on the farm, in the gardens, and in the woods is required of all students for graduation," the school's website explains. "New technology and old are combined to find a way to live more lightly on the land."

Keep reading below to see all of the aspects that make Putney a distinctive high school experience.